1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a CAD data generating device for associating CAD data with a database that stores attribute information associated with this CAD data to generate understanding support data and affixing this understanding support data to the CAD data, and also relates to a CAD data generating method.
2. Related Art
In general, a piping route for pipes used in thermal, nuclear, hydraulic power plants and manufacturing facilities is determined by drafting a piping plan at the time of plant planning. In recent years, use of a three dimensional arrangement adjustment CAD becomes a mainstream method for implementing this arrangement planning in consideration of data input operation and data management and utilization after the data input.
In the pipe arrangement design with use of the three dimensional arrangement adjustment CAD, piping components are arranged on a three dimensional virtual space, and a piping route is determined, thereby generating arrangement data of the piping components.
On the other hand, as specification data of the piping components, various pieces of attribute information of a piping system are generated in a predetermined format such as a spread sheet other than the CAD data. In this specification data contains information containing a detailed name of the piping system, the maximum use pressure and temperature in the piping system, a wall thickness and a material of the pipe, the contents with regard to welding such as joint faces of butt welding, and the piping components. The operation for generating the specification data is conducted on all the pipes in the plant to thereby construct arrangement data and specification data based on the three dimensional arrangement adjustment CAD.
As a prior art with respect to the use of the piping data based on the three dimensional arrangement adjustment CAD, regarding arrangement of plant equipment with use of the three dimensional CAD system and design production support system for pipes, there is exemplified a design production support system which is particularly suitable for laborsaving in the design production by integrating stages of concept building, basic design, construction, and manufacturing (for example, refer to Japanese Patent Application Laid-open Publication No. HEI 6-309418).
In addition, examples of the prior art includes a change management method for the three dimensional CAD data (for example, refer to Japanese Patent Application Laid-open Publication No. 2002-215695), a drawing generating device based on a product model (for example, refer to Japanese Patent Application Laid-open Publication No. 2000-3379), a CAD data management device (for example, refer to Japanese Patent Application Laid-open Publication No. HEI 10-301972), and a product drawing generating device (for example, refer to Japanese Patent Application Laid-open Publication No. HEI 6-290237).
In the design operation, while the piping design tool is used, a database that stores the arrangement data generated by the three dimensional arrangement adjustment CAD and the specification with respect to the arranged components is used to generate a piping isometric drawing. This piping isometric drawing is a manufacturing drawing with which it is possible to judge a three dimensional shape of a certain part in a certain piping system and is used in a pipe installment construction.
In recent years, the piping isometric drawing is generated by way of a CAD drawing for the purpose of reduction in design and manufacturing time. In the case of the CAD drawing, as the reduction in design time is aimed, only minimum necessary information for the installment construction is contained. Thus, in many cases, the drawing is generated in view of providing information to a minimum degree at which no problem is caused at the time of the installment construction as long as the only minimum necessary information for the installment construction is outputted.
However, even when the minimum necessary information for the pipe installment is sufficient in the case of construction under a relatively loose legal regulatory condition, information contained in the piping isometric drawing with such minimum necessary information for the pipe installment may not be sufficient in the case of pipe manufacture and piping system installment under a severe legal regulatory condition.
In this case, although the piping isometric drawing is taken as an example, the same tendency and problems are generally pointed out in drawings generated by the CAD.
On the other hand, in piping design drawings which were used before a design tool such as the three dimensional arrangement adjustment CAD was commonly used, a wide variety of information is contained for the sake of convenience at the time of installment. The contents include not only information about the mere piping installment but also procurement information on components and materials, safety measure information, and product life cycle information (product related information).
However, while the drawing operation is mechanized and automated by using the design tool such as the CAD for pursuing the time reduction effect, important information including the procurement information on components and materials and the product related information is neglected. It is therefore difficult to contain such information in the drawing in the original design stage. For this reason, in the case where the important information is added, after the drawing is outputted, it is necessary to perform an operation for adding the important information by hand or the like, which leads to extra operation time and labor therefor.
Furthermore, in recent years, various engineering tools are used in the respective design departments, thereby decreasing the use frequency of a uniform management tool with high versatility which can be dealt with across a plurality of departments. Under the circumstances of the decreased use frequency of the uniform management tool, coincidence of various kinds of data among dedicated engineering tools is now being difficult to achieve.
Meanwhile, data management of linking a range of data respectively generated by various engineering tools, i.e. dedicated tools, in an independent format and drawing generation while reflecting the different pieces of data are still demanded from the viewpoint of efficient and panoptic designing. Therefore, a tool playing a role of so-called linking by associating a variety of data created by the respective dedicated engineering tools (bridge tool) with each other is required. To be specific, it is necessary to use a device for generating a medium which is a drawing by combining various pieces of data.
However, none of the above-mentioned prior arts provides such a panoptic design tool and design method.